RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine that you own a large department store called Foggy Bottom. Your most frequent customer is a superbly connected globetrotter with some one million miles on her passport. She never uses a standard shopping basket like everyone else. Instead, she strolls in with her own gigantic, custom-made, black-leather handbag.

Quite often when this 68-year-old grandmother visits Foggy Bottom, you catch her shoplifting. Indeed, you have pried 1,340 pilfered items that magically tumbled into her black bag.

How does she get away with it? Whenever you call the police, she gives them the same excuse:

“I did not take anything marked with a price tag.”

You keep wondering, “Why don’t the cops arrest her already?”

The authorities seem to accept her unprecedented justification. But everyone believes she knows better: Just because a sweater lacks a price tag doesn’t make it free of charge.

Eventually, you learn that those price tags didn’t vanish by accident. While you tended to other patrons at Foggy Bottom, you missed members of this crafty lady’s entourage deliberately snipping price tags off the merchandise. That way, when she says, “I never walked off with anything that carried a price tag,” her flimsy rationale somehow seems marginally plausible — at least to those who want to accept it. Now, it slowly emerges, the whole thing was not a parade of pratfalls, but a conspiracy since her four-year-long crime spree began.

Having solved this mystery, at last, you call 911. You hope that law enforcement finally will haul this supercilious woman and her entire posse to jail. And yet you wonder: Will someone this powerful ever receive the equal justice she deserves?

“Then there’s the fact that D.C. handles snow about as well as Bernie Sanders handles questions about the Wu Tang Clan (“Mr. Sanders, how would you describe the totality of Ghostface Killah’s oeuvre?”).

Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.

D.C.’s Collective-Action Problem

Part of the problem is that there’s a tragedy of the commons endemic to D.C. during its snow freak-outs. I’m not worried that we will starve to death in our home, our corpses eventually consumed by the cats (and the cats by the dogs). My wife is Alaskan. She can make six kinds of soup from snow.

But that is precisely the way many other Washingtonians think. And so they run to the supermarkets like the kids in Red Dawn and grab enough provisions to last them until spring. That leaves sane people with a dilemma: Do you run to the store, too, not out of fear of the snow, but out of concern that the deranged masses will clear the shelves?

Irritable Trump Syndrome

And then, of course, there’s Trump.

But before I get to him, I wonder if you caught what I did above. I said I didn’t want to indulge in Acela-corridor navel-gazing, and then I proceeded to spelunk into the very kind of Beltway omphaloskepsis I condemned.

I was, loosely speaking, flirting with apophasis there. Apophasis is a rhetorical device where you bring up something while denying or condemning it. (It shouldn’t be confused with aposiopesis, which is when you . . .)

For instance, you might say, “I do not think the fact that Hillary Clinton put our national security at risk just so she could hide her illegal communications from congressional oversight, journalists, and FOIA requests should be held against her.” Or you might say, “I have no doubt that Bill Clinton is telling the truth. Though I cannot for the life of me figure out why he was pantsless at 3:00 in the morning, trying to push that goat over the fence.”

Apophasis came up on Twitter the other day because Donald Trump tweeted: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”

What Rich Lowry tartly labeled “the Trumpless Debate” exposed the fracture of the Republican party’s base with a clarity that the Donald’s presence would not have allowed.

For those of us in the commentariat, the evening was a joy. It was an exhibition of substance and seriousness, a night of lively exchanges where quality candidates took shots at each other that were hard but fair. The Fox News moderators were no wallflowers, but they were clearly determined to make the night about the contestants: Questions were succinct; interruptions were reserved for moments when candidates were unresponsive or in denial over inconvenient, incontestable facts. It was a glimpse, as David French put it, at “what might have been” — without the blaring Trumpet of snark and bully bravado, it was as if Henry Gondorff had never crashed the old boys’ poker game.

But the thing is: Most people who have a stake in the Republican race are not in the commentariat. They are the people who have been ill-served by the old boys. They are no longer impressed by slick-sounding policy wonkery because they are finally on to the charade: The candidates say one thing to get elected and then do very different things once they’ve been elected.

They like Trump precisely because of the wrench he has thrown in the works. He makes the pols and the press feel as powerless as the pols and the press have made them feel. He doesn’t care about the Beltway’s rules; Trump plays by his own and invites them, vicariously, to play along.

The State Department said it would launch its own investigation into whether top-secret information on Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was classified at the time it was sent or received—a dramatic reversal that comes just days before the Democratic presidential front-runner faces the first nominating contest in Iowa.

Department spokesman John Kirby said 22 documents containing highly classified information will be excluded entirely from the release of Mrs. Clinton’s archive. So far, more than 1,300 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails have been redacted, with portions blocked out, due to the presence of classified information, but this is the first example of emails being entirely withheld from public release.

Friday’s announcement is the first time State Department officials have said they have concerns about the classification level of some of the information contained on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Officials have previously said the redactions in the roughly 43,000 pages of her emails so far released were made for information that was classified only after the fact.

The Clinton campaign said the emails in question probably originated on the department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Mrs. Clinton.

Locked in a tight primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton now faces the possibility of another investigation, led by the department she ran, into whether she compromised sensitive or classified national-security information.